How many songs by The Beatles did George Martin help them write?
The four members of The Beatles may have had more than enough talent and charisma to make it on their own one way or another. But there was still a sizable supporting cast responsible for helping them to the spectacular heights they reached. No one played a bigger role in this cast than producer George Martin.
While a manager at EMI subsidiary Parlophone, which at the time specialised in novelty records, Martin agreed to take The Beatles on in the spring of 1962. He said of their audition for him, “It was fine, but it wasn’t amazing.” He warmed to the band members more as people than as musicians, enjoying their sense of humour and irreverence. George Harrison, for example, famously made fun of Martin’s tie.
Once he began recording with the group, Martin fashioned them into a well-oiled hit machine as well as allowing their personalities to shine in song after song. All in all, he produced recorded a mammoth 188 Beatles songs over a seven-year period, a level unmatched by any other single artist-producer collaboration in rock and roll history.
Yet Martin wasn’t just a producer. He also contributed directly to the band’s songs, performing on at least 37 of them himself. There are likely even more instrumental contributions Martin made to Beatles songs which are still undiscovered, such as the piano part on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.
You could argue that the producer even became one of the group’s songwriters on occasion. For instance, what would the emotive classic ‘In My Life’ be without his glissando-frilled solo on the keys for the song’s middle-eight?
Can we really say Martin wrote any Beatles songs?
Certainly. For a start, he single-handedly composed six of the songs on one of the LPs, which is now officially categorised as one of the 13 studio albums by The Beatles. The orchestral film score that makes up the whole of Side Two on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album is entirely Martin’s work, with no involvement from any of the four band members.
Then there are the orchestral arrangements he undertook for many of the songs on the group’s later albums, from 1966 onwards. In fact, his influence is already plain to see on the 1965 song ‘Yesterday’, which features Paul McCartney as the only Beatle performing, backed by a string quartet track composed by Martin. His training in classical music proved invaluable to facilitating many of the group’s more ambitious ideas for songs.
And going back through their earlier efforts in the studio, the tracks that relied on original George Martin inventions to tie them together number in double figures. To highlight another especially obvious case, Help! album track ‘You Like Me Too Much’ is heavily dependent on Martin’s blues piano line throughout.
Combining the pieces he wrote for Yellow Submarine, all of his orchestral arrangements for the band, and substantial instrumental contributions that he wrote himself, George Martin had a helping hand in the composition of at least 49 Beatles songs.
Although he is often celebrated as the so-called “Fifth Beatle”, it’s not widely appreciated that Martin contributed to the group’s songwriting to this extent. Yes, the songs belong to John, Paul, George and Ringo (and principally the first two). Still, so many of them wouldn’t be what they are without uncredited compositional input from the producer who stayed with The Beatles throughout their career as a band.
